At age eleven, I routinely hung out in the adult section of the public library, shifting from foot-to-foot, reading back issues of Analog magazine until stern librarians enforced the "no children allowed" rule, chasing me back to the bland safety of the children's section. Short stories always appealed to me, even back when I didn't understand half of what I read and when MG and YA weren't yet marketing labels. I loved--and still love--the quick, sharp encapsulation of an idea, a world, a moment--that prismatic effect of a small idea expanding into a large rainbow of thoughts.

Although the act of sneaking my fiction may have added slightly to my enjoyment, I'd prefer that today's kids don't have to sample their fiction that way, but are offered instead a smorgasbord of delights. And delights there are! You just have to find them. Most adult science fiction magazines do crossover into YA territory: Apex, Uncanny, Lightspeed, and Asimov's all publish YA short stories sometimes. Tor.com's 2018 list of best YA SFF includes three short story collections. Of the 70+ stories I've had published, 23 are YA-themed but only nine are in solely-YA publications. Several YA anthology series are worth noting for their double focus on science and diversity:

Issues in Earth Science is "dedicated to raising awareness of the science of our world and our place in it. It provides essays, challenges, a forum for discussion, and fictional stories related to the Earth and Space Sciences." As well as various tools for teachers, the website provides a dozen free online STEM stories intended for classroom use, each featuring a YA protagonist.

Dreaming Robot's Young Explorer's Adventure Guide contains science fiction stories aimed at middle grade readers with a focus on diversity and representation. "One of the qualities that makes this yearly anthology such a treat to read is the wide range of futuristic possibilities that planet Earth and its occupants may encounter, realities that will keep readers wondering long after the book is closed" according to the starred Kirkus review. The fourth volume was just released and the fifth volume will be out in early 2020.

Brave New Girls features brainy young female protagonists who use their smarts to save the day. Proceeds from sales are donated to the Society of Women Engineers scholarship fund. The fourth volume will be out July 2019.

What's the appeal of such anthologies? Short stories are more than just a palatable way for kids to increase their science literacy. If the science is accurate, the learning is better retained[1] and meta-cognition is improved[2]. (Note: the science must be accurate!). There is a fallacy that kids are uncomfortable with the idea that a book might teach them something[3] but kids love to learn! With short stories, a wide variety of topics can be presented quickly and, importantly, serve to pique their interest. A quick flash piece about a black hole may encourage them to learn more when they see a "picture" of a black hole spread across the news.

< The first image ever taken of the event horizon of a supermassive black hole, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2017. (Event Horizon Telescope) >

Audio is another great way for kids to absorb both science and fiction. Cast of Wonders has several hundred free YA podcasts, most of which are about half an hour long (about 3,000 words). Perfect for that bus ride to school or that lazy Saturday morning in bed, without the investment of time and focus that a novel requires.

Although traditionally-published novels will always have a strong influence on young minds, short stories (and self-published novels) are able to react more quickly to societal changes. (I've had a story go from submission to publication within just a few hours). That allows short stories to incorporate social justice movements much faster. Traditional publishing can get there too, but it requires more time. In one inspiring example, the International Publishers Association has partnered with the United Nations to launch a book club for children ages six to twelve, focusing on the UN’s 17 sustainable development goals[4], releasing a selection of new titles each month in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. Those first set of books will come out in 2021--certainly a laudable achievement in only two years; however, Brave New Girls and Young Explorer's Adventure Guide will have published a total of over eighty new stories during that time, each one attuned specifically to today's young adults.

Female protagonists are one example of where short stories can have a hugely positive influence. In the classic 1983 study where kids were asked to draw pictures of scientists, less than one percent drew females. Currently, that figure is up to a heartening 28 percent -- better, but still not great. Short stories can help reshape those persistent stereotypes: if a child reads ten stories of 5,000 words each about female scientists, they've been exposed to ten examples of scientists, rather than the single one they would meet in a 50,000-word novel. Such stories may inspire them to seek out Her Stem Story for anecdotes about real scientists or A Mighty Girl for list of books, such as this one about female environmentalists .

“While play-acting grim scenarios day in and day out may sound like a good recipe for clinical depression, it’s actually weirdly uplifting. Rehearsing for catastrophe has made me positive that I have the problem-solving skills to deal with tough situations and come out the other side smiling." ― Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth

The turbulence of the 1960s meant I needed those stolen moments in the library in order to cope. Today's kids, born into a world of climate change and political turmoil, are no different. They need tools. Tools to help them grow, solve problems logically, and give them positive action plans. Tools like optimism. In the afterword to the Nevertheless anthology, Greg Bechtel says it well[5]: "Optimism, at its best, is a weaponized form of hope….<it offers> counter-narratives to our own persistent stories of fear: of change, of deterioration and loss of stability, of chaos, of death…" STEM-based short stories can present that reality to kids, give them those tools, and instill that optimism--a large outcome for such a small input.

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Holly Schofield travels through time at the rate of one second per second, oscillating between the alternate realities of city and country life. Her stories of skiffy hopepunk have appeared in such publications as Analog, Lightspeed, Cast of Wonders, Brave New Girls, and Young Explorer's Adventure Guide, are used in university curricula, and have been translated into several languages. She hopes to save the world through science fiction and homegrown heritage tomatoes. Find a complete list of her stories at hollyschofield.wordpress.com.

This week we are taking an academic dive into middle grade sci-fi with a special guest post by friend and fellow VCFA grad, Diane Telgen. I asked her to condense her brilliant thesis into a blog post, a herculean request to say the least. Of course, she did it easily and without complaint.

Please welcome, Diane Telgen.

Diane Telgen is a freelance writer and an editor with Angelella Editorial. She holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts; parts of this essay were excerpted from her critical thesis. Her current works in progress include a middle-grade science-fiction novel involving first contact at a lunar-orbiting space station. You can find her online at dianetelgen.com or on Twitter @originalneglet.

I’ve always had a love for science fiction. My earliest memories include my dad telling me to pay attention to the television because the future was here: man was about to land on the moon. Dad was a tech geek before such a term even existed, and novels by sci-fi’s Big Three—Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein—littered his bedside table. Any time Star Trek came on, first-run or repeats, we tuned in. There’s no question I owe my father for my affinity for science fiction and all things space-related.

A visit to my school library in sixth grade opened my eyes even further to the possibilities of the genre. I read all kinds of books voraciously, but one day I chanced upon a novel by Andre Norton titled Moon of Three Rings. I browsed the flap copy and thought the story, about a young crewmember on a galactic trading ship, sounded interesting. Then I scanned the first few pages and paused on the title page, where handwriting marred the clean white page. Under the byline, the school’s librarian had penciled in a different name: Norton, Alice Mary.[1]﻿

My young self, barely cognizant of the feminist movement just then transforming the wider world, stared. Wait a minute—you mean GIRLS can write about SPACESHIPS?!?!?!

From that point on, I devoured whatever science fiction I could find. Library books, my dad’s books, books I wheedled my mom to buy whenever we visited the book store … I wanted as much as I could read. By the time I was in my teens, the paucity of YA literature at the time meant I’d moved on to adult sci-fi, and fantasy, too. I was a full-fledged genre nerd, loud and proud.

My sixth-grade self somehow recognized that someday I’d want to write my own novels, and after finishing college I began writing in my spare time. Eventually I realized that my natural narrative voice lay closer to middle-grade and young-adult than adult genre fiction, and both my writing and reading habits turned back to children’s books. Sadly, I wasn’t finding much sci-fi being written for younger readers—or if I did, it wasn’t labeled as such. Star Trek and Star Wars and comic-book movies featuring mutant, scientist, and alien superheroes may have dominated pop culture over the past two generations, but publishers kept calling popular series like The Hunger Games or Divergent “dystopia” instead of the broader genre term: science fiction. Yes, there was Nancy Farmer’s award-winning House of the Scorpion, but that novel about cloning seemed to be an outlier.

When I decided to go to Vermont College of Fine Arts to get my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults, I wrote on essay on the brilliant ways Farmer made the scientific aspects of her world easily accessible to her young readers. My advisor that semester, David Macinnis Gill—the author of the YA sci-fi series beginning with Black Hole Sun—suggested that maybe I’d found a subject for my critical thesis. Yes! I thought. I read as many middle-grade sci-fi novels as I could, from Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time—a childhood favorite—to more recent works. While the bulk of my thesis analyzed the methods these works used to present science, I opened by examining whether science fiction was an appropriate genre for a younger audience. As you can probably guess, my conclusion was another Yes!

I came to this verdict despite the comparative dearth of middle-grade SF novels and the conventional wisdom, as one critic observed, “that while even very small children can appreciate the marvelous, ... it is difficult to convey scientific marvels to anyone who lacks an adequate grounding in basic science.”[2] Another critic made the fair point that many children’s books are “science fiction only by courtesy. Aliens and robots are reduced to the level of icon and take the place of fairies, elves and monsters.”[3] But she also questioned whether it was even possible to write “full” sci-fi for kids, arguing that works for children often neglects the genre’s essential theme of change in favor of resolutions involving coming-of-age or family issues. In true sci-fi, “the resolution is not the end of the story, it is the beginning, for SF resolutions are about change and consequence.”[4]

This is too narrow a definition, however, especially when considering sci-fi’s origins and development. The term has undergone many revisions since 1926, when pioneering magazine editor Hugo Gernsback defined “scientifiction” in the first issue of Amazing Stories as “a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.”[5]The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction notes:

[while] there is really no good reason to expect that a workable definition of sf will ever be established, ... we may feel that, if sf ever loses its sense of the fluidity of the future and the excitement of our scientific attempts to understand our Universe—in short, as more conservative fans would put it with enthusiasm though conceptual vagueness, its Sense of Wonder—then it may no longer be worth fighting over.[6]

Portraying possible futures and using science to comprehend the universe seems clear enough, but how does one define the “sense of wonder”? The phrase is open to interpretation, but many critics connect it with the work of Clarke, one of the best-known sci-fi authors of the twentieth century. He argued that “although it has become something of a cliché, perhaps the most important attribute of good science fiction—and the one that uniquely distinguishes it from mainstream fiction—is its ability to evoke the sense of wonder.”[7] In works such as Rendezvous with Rama and 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke’s characters—and by extension the reader—marvel wide-eyed at encounters with aliens or alien technology, bringing to their experiences the same “sense of wonder” that a child has when learning about the wider world.

Two other pioneers of SF’s first Golden Age also remarked upon the inherent appeal that the genre holds for young readers. Heinlein, whose early SF novels of the 1950s were marketed to juveniles, asserted that “in a broader sense, all science fiction prepares young people to live and survive in a world of ever-continuing change by teaching them early that the world does change.”[8] The prolific and influential writer Asimov, best known for his “Three Laws of Robotics,” agreed that “the great service of science fiction” was “to accustom the reader to the possibility of change, to have him think along various lines—perhaps very daring lines.”[9]

To anyone who thinks that science fiction isn’t appropriate for the middle-grade audience, or that you can’t write “real” sci-fi for them, I counter: the genre has an inherent appeal for young readers. They explore the world around them with the natural curiosity of a scientist and are more open to learning about the weird and wonderful universe around them. So go build your new and exciting sci-fi worlds. Encourage young minds to remain open, to find joy in exploring a universe full of possibility, and to consider strange new worlds without automatically rejecting them as different. These are worthy goals for a writer in any genre.

[1] Never mind that “Alice Mary” legally changed her name to “Andre” long before the book’s publication; librarians are thorough when it comes to their catalogues.